Population pyramids

All people have different personalities. We have different interests, styles, and opinions. We are all unique, in our own particular way. But we do also have much in common with others even with people we don’t know. When we work with demography, we look at groups of people for example the population of a country.

We try to find what people have in common and what differentiates them from each other. Like this: Children need to attend school Most grown-ups need a job Women are able to bear children during a specific period in life and elderly people tend to suffer from more illnesses than young people. People who belong to the same age group and gender do often have similar needs. And because we know that, we can say more about what a particular population needs: When there are many children, then there is a need for many schools. And when there are many old people, there is a need for more care services.

And adults in between those ages work in hospitals, in schools, in farming, in factories, in offices. They take care of the children, and the elderly. They are important for making a society function! To learn more about a particular population, we therefore often start by finding out how age and gender are distributed. Let’s suppose we asked this population to sort themselves into age groups.

Hey everyone! Can we get the babies in a row at the bottom! Good! Then the young people! Retirees!

You need to be at the top! Looking good! Hm, hey, you’re supposed to be up there! That’s it! Nice work!

Look at the shape. Doesn’t it look like a pyramid. We have made a population pyramid! The population pyramid is a specific form of picture, a diagram, that is used for comparing age and gender distribution in a population. Each level represents an age group and the length of each bar shows the size of that group.

The pyramid is cut in half: on one side there are men, and on the other there are women. When the same number of men and women are born, the bars on each side have the same length. The lower part, the base, consists of the age groups that count as children. They need to attend school and are dependent on grown-ups, who support them. In the middle are the grown-ups who are of working age, and are usually taking care of children, or their own older parents.

At the top we have the elderly who no longer work. They live on a pension, or are supported by their children. Despite their name, population pyramids don’t always have a pyramid shape. Both of these show The distribution of age groups and gender. But they have different shapes.

The shapes helps us to compare the groups. This one looks like a pyramid. It has a broad base and a narrow top. In this population there are many children. And few becoming very old.

The other one has a rounder shape and a narrow base. Here, very few children are born. And there is quite a large number of old people. The shape can quickly give us a picture of a population and what its needs are - based on age and gender. But remember that the population pyramid shows patterns of large groups of people.

When we use it we don’t look at details – we generalise. When we look at individuals on the other hand, we see that all people aren’t the same. There are actually people who don’t like ice cream.